Its no coincidence that I blogged about the lack of an iPhone/Domino solution from IBM one week after the WWDC keynote. I made myself wait that long – to calm down. 
I thought I’d counter my “Exchange tendencies” with a quick mention of some positive things IBM is doing around the IBM product:
- New Wikis are available for products like Quickr, Sametime and Domino (among others). This is a GREAT idea and a great way to allow customers to participate in things like “best practices” documentation and learning. Brilliant, Lotus!
- There’s a new Notes/Domino page on ibm.com. I think this looks really nice – and is much more like something I thought they should have done with the release of 8.0. My biggest compliment: its not over-cluttered with technospeak wrapped in managerialesque-ness. (You know, stuff like “Notes/Domino is the premier collaboration platform based on Eclipse technology which is designed to reduce your TCO through powerful industry standard tools and compliance based rapid application blah blah blah…”)
- After following the link (on page in #2 above) to read more about Domino Web Access, I saw my biggest surprise yet: a picture of an iPhone with a dedicated page all about how to get this thing to work in the enterprise!
…to my surprise, they didn’t tell people to go buy Exchange. No, they had a whole set of images and descriptions posted that talk about an offering from IBM to tie your iPhone to Lotus Notes. Sure, there’s no ETA (other than “PLANNED for delivery in 2008″). Sure, there’s no mention of push email, calendar or to-do’s. Sure, there’s no mention of administration tools, encryption or how easy it’ll be to set up – but hey, they mentioned it.
I’ll place my bets now on the following predictions:
- LATE 2008 delivery, as a beta
- Uses DWA super-lite
- Requires you to authenticate (on your iPhone)
- No push
- No administration tools (remote setup, remote disable, encryption, etc.)
Go ahead… tell me I’m wrong. I’d LOVE to be wrong. Please!
June 16th, 2008 at 9:37 pm
Kevin,
The iphone has been discussed on a bunch of lotus-related blogs for the last week. In all three of my postings on the topic, I specifically mentioned the DWA “ultralite” mode…which is what we announced at lotusphere. It is in fact being delivered *early* in domino 8.0.2, expected to ship in August. It is already in beta, though admittedly an earlier build, in the 8.5 domino public beta.
There are also third party solutions in market today such as sybase ianywhere.
Btw a real pain to comment on your blog from a blackberry.
June 17th, 2008 at 9:51 am
Ed,
I worry that IBM is missing the point: a solution that works just as well as what Apple demoed with Exchange (or as well as offerings that are like the Blackberry one) needs to be available from IBM for the iPhone. It is too important and significant of a device to ignore. DWA ultralite is not good enough.
I’ll look for a WordPress plugin for Blackberry. For what its worth, I posted this reply from an iPhone (ironically while at an IBM office) and it worked great.
Final thought: as someone who’s passionate about Domino and Apple products I think the amount of collective blogging on this iPhone topic just serves to illustrate how many other people are out there that want and now, need these products to work perfectly together. Prior to WWDC ‘08 that was because it was cool. Now, its because our organizations are suddenly demanding us to provide iPhone functionality that many people are now aware of. Apple and Microsoft have set the expectations and prompted our users to ask IT: so why do we continue to use Notes? – That puts us back to having to sell it internally all over again.